Like its namesake barrels that transported soda crackers until boxes replaced them, Cracker Barrel needed to change.
The restaurant chain’s new CEO, Julie Felss Masino, laid out the argument to investors last year: Cracker Barrel’s customer traffic was down 16% compared to 2019. Research showed consumers thought the brand fell short of competitors in essential ways, from the quality of the food to value and convenience.
“We are not leading in any area. We will change that,” Masino said.
But over the past week, Cracker Barrel’s attempted revamp hit a wall. The company saw severe backlash over its plans to modernize and simplify its nostalgic logo – including from President Donald Trump.
“I don’t like the changes. I mean it’s always been Cracker Barrel like it is, so I’d like for it to stay like it is,” customer Sid Leist said during a visit to a Cracker Barrel in Vicksburg, Mississippi, on Tuesday.
By that evening, Cracker Barrel had reversed course and said its old logo would remain. It features an overall-clad man – said to represent Uncle Herschel, a relative of Cracker Barrel’s founder – leaning on a barrel, with the words “Old Country Store” underneath.
Here’s how Lebanon, Tennessee-based Cracker Barrel got to this point and where it might go from here:
Transformation plan
Cracker Barrel hired Masino, a longtime Taco Bell and Starbucks executive, in July 2023. She was chosen for her record as an innovator, with the hope that she would attract new customers to Cracker Barrel, which operates 660 restaurants in 43 states.
Masino introduced updated menu items, like Hashbrown Casserole Shepherd’s Pie, to increase Cracker Barrel’s dinnertime traffic. She also started remodeling the company’s dark, antique-filled restaurants, lightening the walls and installing more comfortable seating.
The changes appeared to be helping. Cracker Barrel’s fiscal third quarter, which ended May 2, was the fourth consecutive quarter of same-store sales growth for the company. Same-store sales, a key metric for restaurants, measures sales at locations open at least one year.
Logo misstep
Richard Wilke, a former executive at the brand consultancy Lippincott who helped lead rebrands for companies like Delta Air Lines and Walmart, said Cracker Barrel’s existing logo is too detailed and fussy for the digital age, when companies have to think about how their brand appears in a smartphone app.
But Wilke said Cracker Barrel’s new logo, featuring just the company’s name in brown letters on a gold background, lacked character. The logo’s rollout also seemed like an afterthought. In a press release about new fall menu items released Aug. 18, the company mentioned the new logo in the fourth paragraph.
The approach Walmart took in 2008 provides a better model for a successful rebrand, according to Wilke. Walmart wanted to broaden its appeal, especially to shoppers in urban areas. It redesigned stores, slowly adding a new blue-and-yellow color scheme and yellow asterisk symbol. It trained employees on the meaning behind its new slogan, “Save money. Live better.”
After a year or more, the company finally introduced its new logo, which added the yellow asterisk and dropped the hyphen from Wal-Mart in order to de-emphasize the discount term “Mart.”
“The logo change was almost a natural conclusion to this multi-year transformation,” Wilke said. “I suspect that if we did it in the same sequence as Cracker Barrel, we would have gotten the same noise.”
Nostalgia factor
Cracker Barrel acknowledged Monday that it should have done a better job with the new logo’s rollout.
The company said it should have emphasized all the things that would remain the same about Cracker Barrel restaurants: the rocking chairs on the front porches, fireplaces in the dining rooms and vintage Americana and antiques scattered throughout.
The company said it would also continue to honor Uncle Herschel on its menu and on items sold in the country-style stores attached to its restaurants. But it was too late, and Cracker Barrel pulled its new logo the next day.
Thomas Murphy, a professor of practice at Clark University School of Business, said returning to the original logo was a “positive course correction” given the intensity of fans’ response. Now, Murphy said, Cracker Barrel should reinforce the message that it’s not moving away from its values or heritage.
Murphy said Cracker Barrel can continue to “refresh” its stores, making them brighter and more welcoming to younger customers. But it doesn’t really need to “rebrand,” he said, which would indicate a bigger change in direction or purpose.
Political fallout
One difference with past corporate transformations — including a 2014 rebrand by Southwest Airlines to attract more business customers or Dunkin’ Donuts 2019 renaming to Dunkin’ — is the more divisive political climate.
Cracker Barrel caught heat not only from Donald Trump Jr. but from the president himself. On Tuesday morning, Trump said via Truth Social that Cracker Barrel “should go back to the old logo, admit a mistake based on customer response (the ultimate Poll), and manage the company better than ever before.”
Later, Trump celebrated Cracker Barrel’s decision to drop its new logo.
Wilke said he wishes both Republicans and Democrats would stay out of brand decisions like Cracker Barrel’s. Rebrands are almost always about trying to attract new customers without alienating old ones, he said.
“This isn’t a political story,” he said. “If politicians now turn every company logo design update into a debate about being ‘woke’ or ‘anti-woke,’ we are headed into a damaging new era for corporate branding.”
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AP Video Journalist Sophie Bates contributed from Vicksburg, Mississippi.
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